Thursday, November 6, 2014

The online landscape has seen incredible changes over the last years. Social media channels are booming, mobile is taking over the planet, Google is churning out and killing off apps like there is no tomorrow, and SEO is as hard to keep up with as ever.

We've taken out our crystal ball for you and made some predictions for SEO in 2015.

Mobile Will be King

Mobile traffic is predicted to overtake normal web traffic by 2015. This means that mobile searches will also more than likely take over desktop searches by then. Many businesses are still pretty much ignoring mobile, which gives you the opportunity to leverage this right now. Start working on the refresh of your mobile website and develop a solid mobile SEO strategy.

Social is Taking Over

Some experts say that social media is already taking over SEO. While we are convinced that SEO is not dead and won’t be by 2015, social media will become more and more important for your online marketing strategy. Social media will be important as a marketing channel on its own, but also to boost your search engine rankings. Search engine algorithms are already including social signals to calculate rankings today.

Email Will Survive Them All

Email will be as important as ever. With the overload in data that people deal with on the internet, only really good marketing emails will still make an impact though. This means more personalized content and laser-focused targeting.

Real-Time is Where it’s at

Customers are already expecting near real-time communication today and won’t put up with being put on hold for 30 minutes anymore in 2015.

Semantic Supremacy

Old school keyword targeting is just about dead already, but by 2015, context will truly be king. Semantic search will be so good at understanding search queries that your keyword-focused content will be pushed back to page number 10 if you don’t know how to incorporate context in your online marketing activities.

Everybody Will be Doing it

If you’re not doing any SEO yet, start today or be left behind. By 2015, depending on the sector you are in, most if not all your competitors will be doing at least some SEO.

Be Fast and User-Friendly or be Left Behind

Google doesn't like slow, hard to navigate websites and they will get better and better at picking up on this.

Author rank

Your website’s authors will play a very important role in your SEO. Hiring influential authors that display high authority in their fields – based on social signals, comments and quality writing – will increase your rankings.

Content

Google is done with spammy backlinks and spun content. By 2015 their algorithm will be so refined that ranking with blackhat tactics will become very difficult. Start hiring good content writers.

Freshness

Yesterday’s news is old news. Content needs to be current or it becomes obsolete.